Is the Barrio 18 spoiling the gang truce in El Salvador?

According to Geoffrey Ramsey of The Pan-American Post,

After months of escalating violence, El Salvador’s shaky gang truce has finally collapsed. At least according to outgoing Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, who announced in his radio show over the weekend that it had been broken by members of the Barrio 18 street gang. And while the president said the truce was in a certain “fragile” state that may be re-launched, he said he would announce a “contingency plan” to coordinate security with President-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren. 

According to President Funes, it turns out the one faction of the Barrio 18 street gang has broken the truce - either the Revolutionaries or the Southerners - but he does not say. Obviously not the same, but we do know from the study of civil war that negotiated settlements are less likely to be reached and to break down when there are greater numbers of factions fighting in a country. The factions can end up fighting each other as much as they are fighting the central government. When the truce first began, there was surprise at how organizationally coherent the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs were. Imprisoned leaders put an end to the killings almost overnight. That is a reason why people were much more skeptical about the Honduran gang truce where the gangs are believed to be much more fragmented.

We also have a pretty rich literature on the role of spoilers in peace processes which in some ways the gang truce reflects. There are almost always groups that find it in their best interest to continue fighting rather than to negotiate. If not dealt with somehow, perhaps a third party enforcer, these spoilers can destroy a peace process. Can the national government and the gang factions who want the truce to succeed (if there are any) work together to isolate the spoiler? I'm pretty sure I wrote this earlier as well but here is what I wrote in July 2013.

I'll stick with my take that the truce was a good choice by the government in order to lower the violence and to give itself an opportunity to reorient its approach away from mano dura and towards a more comprehensive approach to the gang challenge. The government also needed to try to get as many gang members out with the full realization that many are going to return to that lifestyle. When that happens, they needed to avoid condemning all those who had been at one point involved in the gang. If some go back to the crazy life, don't implement policies that ensure everyone does. Given the truce is failing memo that spread at the beginning of the month, I'm not sure that any of this has happened.

While spoilers and rebel fragmentation are big in the civil wars literature today, they haven't been addressed too much in the study of the Central American revolutionary wars. Alberto Martin and I have a paper that looks at fragmentation in the FMLN and I am working on others related to the URNG and to the FMLN/FSLN/URNG. And with regards to spoilers, that has really gotten any solid attention. For the Central American wars, there don't appear to have been any spoilers on the guerrilla sides that strategically sought to derail negotiations. However, I can think of factions within the Guatemalan and Salvadoran militaries as working as spoilers - think of the rumblings of coups in the late 1980s/early 1990s. The US helped put an end to those spoiler attempts.